On Christmas Eve eve, I was over at my parents' house in Newport Beach working on my Dad's computer while my Dad and brothers watched a Pink Floyd concert video. Suddenly one of my brothers yelled to me that there was a UFO in the sky. I ran into the den to join them at the behind-the-TV window they had spotted the UFO through, but they said that it was no longer visible. We ran out to the back yard to see if we could see it again, and they gave a brief description of what they thought was an alien craft, and how it had shot away in an impossible manner when it went out of sight. While I believed they had certainly seen something, I was going to wait until I saw it for myself before buying into alien origin. After many minutes of waiting for it to show up again, to no avail, we all went back inside.
They went back to their video, keeping an eye on the window, and I went back to my computer task. After a few more minutes, they yelled that it was back. I ran out to the back yard to join them, and sure enough, there was a bright glowing disc or ring hovering, twirling, and jerking around in the sky. It did look pretty incredible, but as the family's resident skeptic, as I watched it I said I thought it was probably a special kite or something, which my brother Steve debated. The only thing that gave me any pause was how incredibly bright it was. However, it appeared to be cycling between different colors in the "neat light-up toy" way characteristic of RGB LEDs. I whipped out my Treo 700p smartphone to see if I could record any video of it in spite of the 700p camera's poor low-light ability and inability to zoom. Sure enough, the video is pretty worthless, though applying maximum gamma correction in my video editor, there are a number of frames where the UFO is visible (and shows up as more than just a single white pixel). Here's the best frame I was able to find:
The UFO danced around in the sky for awhile, then began to descend behind the trees, seemingly into the park behind my parents' house. I wanted to identify the object, and was reasonably secure that I wasn't risking alien abduction, so I hopped the back wall, ran down the hill, across the street, and into the park. After a fair bit of running, I came across a guy walking towards an SUV with a circular RC plane and a remote controller. A few neighborhood folks who had evidently preceded me in investigating were saying their goodbyes.
The guy was strangely reticent to talk -- not sure if he was trying to get out of there before too many people (or police) showed up or if he was just late for something. While he quickly packed up and prepared to leave, though, I did get to ask him whether the UFO was a commercial product or homemade, and he said the latter. I asked how it was so bright, and he replied that it used a ring of LEDs (kind of amazing that it's discrete LEDs -- it totally looked like a coherent glowing ring at a distance -- probably the LEDs reflect off the body of the vehicle to achieve this look). He also made the comment, "I guarantee that if I flew a full-size model, I'd empty out this entire neighborhood." Finally, he mentioned having a website, and I asked for the address -- it's http://murphyufo.homestead.com/. Not too much on that site right now, other than a log of flights in Laguna Beach and Huntington Beach last October, and a page with info on how you can buy one of the UFOs for $1,500 (6-8 week waiting period).
Googling for his name, Gaylon Murphy, I was able to turn up a bit more information, including this L.A. Times article from March 2006, Rash of UFO sightings cause a stir. Actually, I'm not sure if that was the original title of the article. Aside from that syndicated copy on the Concord Monitor's site, I found another copy entitled Close encounters of the nerd kind posted as a comment to a story on the Skepchick blog (scroll down to the second comment). The latter copy contains corrupted UTF-8 punctuation characters, making it annoying to read, but it includes a bunch of text that was cut out of the Concord Monitor version. I can't point to latimes.com for the definitive version because that crappy site now requires payment for access to all archive content. For the full story, there's one more site you need to visit -- on Make Magazine blog page It Came From the Planet Garage, you can see a technical illustration and a photo of Murphy and his partner Steve Zingali holding up their flying discs, also from the original L.A. Times article. The article, by the way, reveals how much Murphy and Zingali enjoy hoaxing people with their UFOs:
"We fly them in formation. It's pretty funny," said Murphy, a cardiovascular surgeon. "People stop, people scream, one cabdriver ran his car up off the road."
Lovely. Perhaps Murphy's trying to drum up heart-attack business for his
practice. 
Anyhow, if you see a mysterious flying
disc in the skies of Orange County anytime soon, direct your gaze toward the
ground for a guy with a controller.
Dan Harkless
Last modified: January 24, 2007
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